Disable sticky option for specific categories

I ended up going with another approach. I check to see what the current user’s role is, then if the role is ‘author’, enqueued a CSS file to hide the sticky option’s checkbox.

In the theme’s functions.php file:

function hide_sticky_option($hook) {
    global $current_user;

    if('post.php'== $hook || 'post-new.php'==$hook){
        $role = array_shift($current_user->roles); //get role of current user
        if($role=='author'){ //if role of current user is 'author'
            wp_enqueue_style('hide_sticky_option', get_template_directory_uri() . '/css/admin-post-style.css' );
        }
    }
}
add_action( 'admin_enqueue_scripts', 'hide_sticky_option' );

admin-post-style.css:

#sticky-span {
    display:none !important;
}